Billionaire Dispatches from Tampa: Day One

So they’re postponing the opening of the Republican Convention due to extreme weather. All of us big bundlers are hunkering down at the Weston Tampa Harbor Island Hotel. My security people tell me that some of those Occupy protestors have come out to try to vie for the attention of the media that we own. We’ll stay nice and dry while they get drenched, which seems to be an apt metaphor to how the economy has been of late! Adelson’s got the accommodations next to ours, and for a guy who has made his fortune in casinos, you’d think he’d be a little less grumpy about the stream of Tampa Bay’s famous strippers coming in and out of our suites.

We’ve been holding court for all the candidates covetous of our prodigious cash. This morning, the Tea-Party Senate candidate from Ohio got on his knees in front of me and gave me the sweetest pedicure I’ve ever had. My toes are positively gleaming. I promptly wrote him a big fat token of my appreciation.

Politicians offer the best return on our investment. A few thousand dollars for their campaign gets us legislation that puts millions of dollars of subsidies and tax breaks in our pockets!
I’ve already put some millions of dollars into Restore Our Future, the Romney Super Pac. For that kind of cheese, I’m counting on the mineral rights to the whole state of Wyoming!

Today was supposed to be the day when we paid lip service to the millions of Social Conservatives – Fundamentalist Christians, Tea Partiers, Anti-Immigrant militias, Birthers, 2nd Amendment activists who make up the meat of our coalition. I was looking Deportation forward to the Minutemen’s “Self-Ballet,” as well as the Family Values Coalition’s Powerpoint on how Gay Marriage makes every single Traditional Marriage seem like an exercise in futility.

We Billionaires are less than a 10th of one percent of the population. We can’t do it alone. If our candidates only ran on our issues, they’d get creamed, which is why we have them emit all those dog-whistle signals to our foot soldiers on issues like Gay Marriage and Abortion so they get out there and vote for officials who will privatize the entire safety net and deregulate every corporate endeavor.

We don’t give a fig for whether or not a woman has the right to get an abortion. It’s kind of a wash for us – if she’s forced to give birth, we resent it if one of our policies covers her offspring, but we also welcome the arrival of another powerless peon to work in our factories. However, our Social Conservatives sure do care – a lot. So the guys we’re electing promise them to ban all abortions while they promise us to eliminate taxes on capital gains.

When Mitt gets in and signs the bill that outlaws abortion even in cases of rape and incest, my family won’t suffer. I employ an on-staff physicians who will take care of my daughter should the wrong person impregnate her. It’s the same physician who grinds up the pituitary gland of an endangered species of pygmy antelope and injects it into my gluteus maximus every morning so I can feel as young as newly minted money all day long!

Oh, I gotta go. Jackson’s Bistro just delivered a bunch of their famous Key West Conch Fritters. I love food that’s on the verge of extinction!

Clifford “Felonius Ax” Tasner

Posted: Monday 27 Augsut 2012

Posted on August 26, 2012

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About Clifford J. Tasner

Clifford J. Tasner is the President of the Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action and the Secretary of the National ADA. He is a film composer whose film VERBATIM: THE FERGUSON CASE was screened at Sundance in 2016. Since 2000, he has been writing and producing the songs for the political satire street theater collective, The Billionaires.

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Michael Krikorian: There may be more doomed locales in town – the coroner’s identification room, a hospice where the only hope is that the end will soon come – but, for a mass gathering of gloom, nothing beats the CJ crowd on a Sunday.